1. Field of invention
This invention relates to stationary exercise equipment and seats used by such equipment. More specifically, the invention relates to seats used by cardio-fitness stations.
2. Background of the Invention
Stationary exercise equipment, which can be but are not limited to stationary exercise bicycles, are ubiquitous for in-house exercise and fitness clubs. Typically, a user (referred to as a rider) pedals to dissipate power and exercise his/her muscles on a stationary exercise equipment. There are two types of stationary exercise equipment—upright and recumbent, each having a seat on which the rider sits while exercising. The upright exercise equipment requires a rider to sit straight. The recumbent exercise equipment allows the rider to sit back, which is sometimes preferred by people with lower back pain or reduced mobility.
For posture and proper exercise reasons, seat position is one of the major characteristics that the rider considers when selecting a stationary exercise equipment. Stationary exercise equipment manufacturers typically opt for a wide and comfortable seat to satisfy the broadest population and regularly offer user-friendly seat height adjustment.
State of the art exercise equipment have many features found on their real world counterparts (such as road bicycles). Such features include but are not limited to, pedals with a varying degree of pedaling resistance, handlebars that turn, gear-shifting members, and bicycle-like seats. The exercise equipment may also have features that generally do not appear on their real world counterparts, such as heart-rate monitoring, video and sound entertainment. Cardio-fitness stations, the most advanced stationary exercise equipment to date, offer virtual reality capabilities that allow the rider to interact with a virtual environment shown on a video monitor and to experience a virtual ride through a predetermined landscape with hills, valleys, and road obstacles. Such feature has given rise to competition between riders exercising on two cardio-fitness stations, i.e., the riders can operate separate cardio-fitness stations to ride jointly in a race through the same predetermined virtual landscape.
Riders of such advanced exercise equipment with virtual reality capabilities, and of other stationary exercise equipment in general where the riders sit while exercising, tend to spend a lot of time on these equipment and may probably get sore muscles if the seats of the equipment are uncomfortable. In the case of a real world road bicycle (for a non-limiting example), the rider usually selects his/her preferred seat at the time of the purchase, does not share the seat with other users, and rarely has a need to replace the seat for any reason other than replacing a defective or a broken item. In addition, road bicycle offers adjustments of seat height as well as seat proximity to handlebars (in further text referred to as “seat proximity”) so the rider can position him/herself properly. Here, the adjustment of seat proximity usually is quite difficult and is less common on recreational bicycles. In contrast, a stationary exercise equipment in a fitness club may have many riders, and thus may cause several problems. First, different riders have different preferences of the type, size, and position of the seat of the stationary exercise equipment, hence one seat type or limited seat position adjustment will not generally satisfy most riders. Second, with many riders using the same seat for prolonged times, the seat has to be cleaned often. Simple on-site cleaning has been the general approach to resolve this issue, but that may not be sufficient for at least some of the riders. These multi-rider issues are particularly pronounced in sophisticated exercise equipment such as the cardio-fitness stations, which are often the most popular choice in the fitness clubs.
There is an apparent need in the industry to provide a stationary exercise equipment in general, and a cardio-fitness station in particular, with the following features: (a) user-friendly adjustment of the seat position (both seat height and seat proximity), (b) exchange of the seat type to one that is more suitable for the rider, and (c) user-friendly seat removal.